


Stone Needles

by LadyStolzenfels



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bad Ending, Bugs & Insects, Character Study, Criminally Underused Characters, Dramatic, Gen, I wrote this for the Atmosphere, Look I just like Koh, Psychological Horror, Rare Characters, Sort Of, Spirit World (Avatar), You already know what's going to happen tho, introspection i suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25762243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyStolzenfels/pseuds/LadyStolzenfels
Summary: Koh drags Ummi into the spirit world to punish Avatar Kuruk for his arrogance.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	Stone Needles

**Author's Note:**

> I really liked Koh as a character, so I took this concept they had with him stealing Ummi away from Kuruk and tried to write how I thought it would have gone.
> 
> I mostly wrote this so I could have fun with Koh and put in a ton of his creepy atmosphere, so it mostly turned into a mood-based piece. I also took some liberties with Ummi's character, and sort of stretched Koh's abilities in places, but I tried to stick as close to canon as possible.
> 
> Hope you like my overdramatic bs!

Sinking.

Ummi fell into the pool of warm water. It wrapped around her like two gloved hands, and pulled her away from the rippling face of the man she was minutes away from marrying.

But that was strange. She had always been one of the stronger swimmers in the Southern Tribe; never in her life had she sunk like there were stones tied to her. Despite knowing that the water was supposed to be warm in the Spirit Oasis, she felt a harsh chill cutting through her in pulsing waves. The only act of mercy the water gave her was the ability to breathe, so she could wait, shiver, and think for as long as she wanted.

Her eyebrows twitched. After a moment of letting herself sink, she didn’t want to be confused any longer. She took one last look at the yelling face plastered to the other side of the water’s surface then twisted, jerked, and began to swim towards the pull on her own terms.

Moments later, she fell through the bottom and hit solid rock. She sat on her hands and knees and breathed heavily before finally getting her bearings straight. A chasm of mist surrounded her in any direction she looked, and small outcroppings of rock—too thin and spire-like to be mountaintops—grew from it and held dull and sparse vegetation at their peaks. She looked down. She had landed on a winding path that snaked its way through the mist toward a large tree at the very centre of it all. Its stony roots gripped the pillar it sat on like a claw, and it stretched into the sky where, instead of spreading an umbrella of leaves, its barren branches held a layer of thick clouds that obscured the sky. Only a dead gold light that flitted in from above the tree allowed her to see any of it.

As she got up and started to walk, she saw motion where the clouds and mist swirled into a dense fog at the skyline. The glowing eyes of a giant hound turned to stare at her before dancing away, and two beating wings further mixed the grey and gold as they took flight. However, neither of them made a sound as they vanished. In fact, all she could her were he sandals tapping against the rock and an endless thin whine like the sound of a bell getting sucked backwards into the metal it rang from. 

To clear the silence, she tried speaking. “Hello? What’s going on here?”

She nodded to the sound of her own voice, and she didn’t wait for an answer that she knew would never come. She was in the spirit world, no doubt about it. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out, but she had no idea why she was here. All she could do was press forward.

When the rock path met the tree, it slipped under one of the large flat roots that led toward a cave at the tree’s base. She looked up. It towered above for miles, but it was flat and featureless. Her gaze slipped back down to the cave in front of her. The top was barely taller than her, and it was dark; she couldn’t see into it past a few feet. She gulped then shook her head back and forth, and she walked into the darkness.

The cavern stretched down into the ground for what felt like ages, but she purposely slowed her progress. Even after she thought her eyes would have adjusted to the dark, she couldn’t see a thing, so she moved by feeling with her hands and feet. It was slow and careful work, but, with each step, she grew used to the stairs beneath her. They were much more evenly spaced than she had expected, so her pace quickened, and soon her hands only grazed the dead bark on the walls.

A minute into her descent, she heard the sound of a thousand rocky needles tapping against the ceiling far behind her. She froze and turned her head. Of course, she saw nothing, so she continued at an even quicker pace. Only a few steps later, she heard the sound agan. When she stopped, it went silent, and when she started to move, it waited, then returned. No matter how much faster she walked, it stayed the same distance away, whether she heard it from the front, behind, or somewhere above. 

Her pace was rushed to the point where she almost jumped down the stairs; when she reached the bottom, she continued forward as though there would be another step, and her sandalled foot hit the flat ground with the full force of her speed behind it. The resulting sound rang like a firework through the cave. It deafened her, and she stopped and covered her ears as the noise echoed against the walls. A few moments later, silence washed over. She waited just a bit longer, worried that sound of the needles might follow, but it never did.

She walked on, still feeling her way along the wall until it disappeared from beneath her fingers altogether. The tunnel opened up into a large circular room, and faint light fell down from far above, illuminating just enough for her to see the outlines of gnarled walls. She threw her gaze around, hoping to make some sense of the shapes in the room. When she made it to the centre—where the ground rose up to meet a thick branch that hung inside the tree from somewhere far above—she jumped and stopped dead. The sound of the needles returned. They came from behind her again and began to multiply. Hundreds became thousands, and thousands became millions. They grew closer and quicker then swirled up and around the circular walls, and when they reached the top high above, they stopped.

She tried to look up, but the faint light had vanished. Something large blocked it out only a few feet above her. A massive, writhing shadow hung in the dark, curling and twisting around itself over and over. After a moment of squirming, it struck. The shadow rushed for her, and she turned on instinct, protecting her head with her arms. She squished her eyes shut and waited, but the impact never came.

The shadow laughed. It’s voice was smooth and deep on the surface, but it echoed with the sound of those countless needled scratching against glass.

“Welcome!” it said. “I see you’re enjoying my comfortable home. Please. Don’t turn your face. I’d like to get a good look at my guest.”

She turned, full of hesitation. When she look at the source of the voice, it clicked its tongue.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh,” said she shadow, “nothing.” It recoiled into the gloom above, and she could feel a pair of eyes gluing their gaze to her as they retreated.

Ummi took a step forward. “Who are you? Why am I here?”

“You mean you don’t know?” For a moment, the shadow twisted in confusion, and the stone needles tittered beneath the silk voice.

She began to feel impatience rising above her fear. “No. No clue.”

The voice hummed. “So you’re not doing that on purpose. Interesting. I’ve never seen a face so naturally guarded as yours. Well then, I suppose I should properly introduce myself.”

There was a sound of wet flesh sliding against itself, and with it a flame erupted in the air in front of her. The room blazed with light, and she could see every detail in the orange glow, including the creature hanging in front of her. Coiled around the dead branch, a massive brown insect—somewhere between a centipede and a worm—hung down before her, curled like a hook at the front end. An uncountable mass of sharp grey pincers sprouted from each brown abdominal bulb that made up the body, and, at the very end of that body, a large eye-like socket was carved into an otherwise featureless head. Only, instead of an eyeball, the socket held the blazing flame which burned brightly in front of what looked like the extremeties of a human face.

“I am called Koh, the Face-Stealer,” said the voice from behind the flame. “And it was I who brought you here.”

“The Face Stealer?” On instinct, she took a few steps back. “And that fire. Is that your face?”

The wormlike body shifted to look at her from the side. “This is but one of the many faces in my collection. Do you like it? It’s the face of a firebender. Comes in handy in a place like this.”

She turned her head—half to avoid looking into the blinding flame and half to avoid confronting the voice that shook at her core. “If it’s not your face, then how did you end up with it?”

“I see you don’t know how I get my faces. Well then let me tell you a little story about this one. You see I’m rather welcoming to… guests. In fact, I’ll answer any question they may have for me to the best of my abilities. Once they get their answers, they just have to make their way back out.”

The fire flickered with a laugh. “This poor sap came with some question or other—for the life of me I can’t remember what—and he tried to hide his face from me by holding some fire in front of it. But of course, fire is the element of power. Bending it is a direct reflection of one’s will…” The Face Stealer stretched closer. “...and of one’s emotion.”

Ummi could feel the heat on hear face as the flame danced with delight. She gulped down her breath as she continued to look away.

“Firebenders. They’re always the easiest. All it took was a little shock and spectacle, and—” The eye blinked. The fire went out. Once again, the cave was dark.

“—his emotions burned bright as day.” The whispering voice came from just over her shoulder. She could almost feel the stony pincers grasping at her, and a spasm weaved its way through her body. A deep laugh rang throughout the cave, and the fire reignited. It darted along the walls faster than her eyes could follow, and, in only a few moments, stray branches and twigs were alight with tiny flames that cast light against the walls. When she turned, the Face Stealer had returned to the large branch in the centre where it stared at her once again.

“But you,” it said. “You’re different. I can sense your feelings, but they don’t match that soft smile on your face. It’s almost as though you’re wearing a mask.”

“Well, I’m a waterbender,” was all she decided to say.

“Indeed you are. How frustrating. Can’t you show me just a simple frown? You are scared, aren’t you?” With that same sound of shifting flesh, his large eye blinked three or four times; it cycled through faces that stared at Ummi as the wormlike body drew closer. It stopped just inches from her, and the eye settled on a smooth face painted in white aside from two blue circles around the eyes.

She refused to back away from it. “And why should I do that?”

“The face is a reflection of the soul.” The pincers imitated something like a shrug. “I can know how you feel all I want, but if you don’t show that on your face, then I can’t take it from you.” The grey needles drew nearer, but they never touched. Just before they did, Koh turned like lighting and faced the other direction.

“Good thing about my poker face, then,” she said. “People always tell me they have trouble reading me. Helps me with persistent salesmen sometimes.”

“Oh is that so? Very impressive I’m sure.”

“Yeah. It is. So don’t try anything, Mr. Face Stealer. I’m good under pressure.”

Koh laughed again, but this time genuine amusement flowed from his light chuckles,. The booming malice had disappeared. “Yes, I can tell. It’s no wonder you get along with that useless water tribe Avatar. But that’s fine. The best prey are the hardest to catch.”

Ummi tensed. “What does Kuruk have to do with—”

Koh spun, and only a hair’s breadth was left between their faces. “Careful now. Even an eyebrow raised, and you’re mine.” 

She huffed. “You shouldn’t have told me. I won’t let you get a twitch out of me.”

The eye blinked, and again it cycled through a number of faces like a deck of cards shuffled by swift hands. It finally stopped on an owl’s face. “ _Look_ at this. You wouldn’t think an animal able to show much emotion on its face, hmm? No. Usually you can tell how it’s feeling from the way it moves its tail or how it sits. And yet wise, old Mr. Owl’s face ended up in my collection.”

He blinked again; this time a caterpillar appeared. The bulbous red eyes and the cute puffy green face bulged like festering welts against the polished brown body. In another blink, it was gone, and the long golden hair of a lion’s mane spilled out as the eye reopened. The face looked old to Ummi, and the mouth moved with stony pride as Koh continued to speak.

“None of them could hide it. A crying beak as it took flight, a tensing in the mouth as it inched away, or a glint of fangs as it prepared its defence.”

Ummi’s tone hardened as she spoke through her dead smile. “What should I care? Why are you telling me all of this?”

“I’m trying to tell you that there’s no use in hiding. Not even animals—on their guard by instinct—can keep emotion from their faces. So how do you expect yourself to last? You can close it in as long as you like, but emotion will always boil its way to the surface.”

His words crawled around the cave on millions of tiny needles of their own. They walked along the walls and floor, surrounding her and crawling up her feet to the top of her head. But she resisted and kept her face frozen over as her insides burned with defiance. 

“I’m through listening to your nonsense. You said you’d answer any of my questions, didn’t you? Tell me how to get out of here.”

Koh blinked. His face changed to that of an old man with thin drooping eyebrows and a moustache to match. One of the long eyebrows was raised. “You want to know how to leave? Already? Well, fine. Just go back the same way you came.”

She turned around to leave almost before he finished speaking, but, when she saw the wall behind her, she froze. Tens of openings identical to the one she had entered through pock-marked the wall all the way up to the gloom above. Had she not noticed them before? It had been dark, so she may have missed then. But she could just as easily have believed that the gnarled wall had moved behind her back and opened up this honeycomb of holes on the inside of the tree.

“Oh? You don’t remember which it was? Well it’s got to be one of them, now doesn’t it?”

She whirled around and stared at him, but she could no longer see his face; he had crawled back up the large branch he dangled from and turned his gaze toward the sky.

“But don’t worry,” he continued. “I’ll be an honourable host and tell you which it is. As long as you listen to just one more story of mine.” 

She hesitates as she continued to stare at him. “Alright, I’ll listen.”

“Wonderful.” He showed no sign of movement. “You know the face truly is a beautiful thing. So expressive. You don’t know how easy you have it.”

“Are you trying to guilt me or something?” Ummi said. “It won’t work. I’m in total control.”

“That’s just it. You’re relying on control. This one didn’t even have that pleasure.” Koh shifted and tightened his mile-long body around the branch. “He was a young boy. Only in his teens. Due to certain… circumstances, he couldn’t show even a drop of feeling on his face if he wanted to. He couldn’t smile to his friends or cry to his mother or blush in front of his love. So he came to me. He thought that perhaps I would know how to bring feeling to his face again.”

He paused, and he began to turn. His body curled and brought the face toward her. Koh’s large eye held a bandaged oval between its lids, and, as it drew closer, the bandages fell off and hung down from the sides. Beneath was a face ravaged by burns and long-since healed. It was a face without a face. The eyes and nose were smooth and glued flat to the skin. Only a hole at the bottom of the face opened where she knew a mouth must have been. She had to tense her muscles to maintain her blank smile in the face of this sight.

“He came all the way to me and begged me on his knees,” Koh continued. “But, of course, I’m no god. I couldn’t heal him. All I could do was add him to my collection.”

“I’m sure he was delighted.” Koh’s boasts disgusted her.

“Yes, I didn’t have answers for him, so the best I could do was remove the source of his problems.”

She watched the mouth move up and down on the expressionless face. Something clicked in her mind; two thoughts tried to come together but failed and fell apart. She paused and repeated his words in her head. “Hold on. If you couldn’t help him, then how…?”

“You’re a sharp one,” said the face. “I like you. I’m glad it was you that decided to marry that useless Avatar. I so rarely get the opportunity to play with prey this fun.”

“You’ve been lying!” She stepped back and pointed at him. “It doesn’t matter what my face shows. You could have taken it this whole time, couldn’t you?”

The burned mouth flopped up and down with every word. “Indeed. How else would I have added this face to my collection? Let me tell you, I’ve had as much fun playing with you as I had with him. But it’s getting time to end this little game, I think.”

The face advanced on her, and she matched it with shaking steps backward. However, as much as she moved, the mile-long body could follow. The brown abdomens crackled, and the pincers curled. Ummi tried to keep her smile frozen, but there was no point anymore. She let it crack. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Before a scream could come out, shock flowed through her body, up from her feet and into her head. She froze, and so did Koh. As she stood paralyzed in a pool of her own fear, Koh began to laugh; his entire wormlike frame shook with the spasms.

“Got you.” His voice echoed through the cavern, and he sprang on her like lightning. The stone needles were on her, poking at every side of her face. They dug in at the edges like they were trying to pull off a mask. Her expression had frozen, but this time, it wasn’t through her doing. It felt like an arm that had fallen asleep, responding only with the sensation of a thousand invisible needles when asked to move.

Just before her face was sucked away completely, the expression on the burned face in front of her changed for the first time. The mouth hung open in mimicry of her own terror, and Koh’s voice flowed from it for the last time.

“Do you know which is the simplest of emotions? It’s fear. Fear is instinctual. Not even this face—which refused all other feelings—could hide fear. So, I did grant the boy’s wish. I simply had to show him fear.”

At the realisation of Koh's true lie, her vision went out, and Ummi sank into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a twitter where I talk about ATLA and writing and stuff if you would like to follow that: https://twitter.com/varrickscravat
> 
> I can't guarantee I'll write fics with stunning frequency, but I'll definitely probably do more.


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